Ok ok.. so we had to leave the comfort of tourist-town Roatan and prove to you guys that we can also travel in the mad real Central American cities, the ones that are never mentioned in your travel agency brochures. Today, we need to get to Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras.
The day starts really early while it´s still dark out. The nice germanic owner of the Boulangerie, with whom we´ve been doing business every morning for breakfast, tell us that unless we catch a bus to the pier in Coxen Hole before 6:15AM we would not make the ferry back to La Ceiba (continental Honduras). It is 6:15AM so we decide to go for the cabs waiting around near our hotel. A whole bunch of them come with offers about the same price: 40 Lempiras per person. Our bread-making friend advices me to offer them 100L and one guy bites into it. We flee to the pier and experience this wonderful drive through the coast of this paradise packed into a tiny island, the sun is slowly rising leaving the sky in a mixture of orange, light blue and black.
Once at the pier, we buy tickets and check in our luggage. The ride goes smoothly and since we had partied the night before with our Danish and American friends, we are totally beaten. I slept most of the 2 hour ride while Greg watched some really aweful movie and Alexey helped free some guy trapped in the gents bathroom.
At our arrival, we needed to pick up Rosinante so the first thing I do is check on our horse and find he is doing A-OK. Greg and Alexey stay back claiming our bags which seems to be a time consuming adventure on these ferries. They basically scream your bag number and you have to jump over a mass of people to trade the tickets and get your bag back. Imagine 300 people doing this at the same time. Oh well, in the mean time, I paid the parking bill and once ready, we packed up the car and left.
On our way here on Tuesday, we told you how the cheap breakfast place in La Ceiba was actually very good. So we decided to go back there and see our old pal at the Pulperia. After a few rounds around the block trying to remember the exact location of this grocery store, we find it and once again we scrape the bottom of Rosinante against a concrete mound. See, the problem is that we have to park on the sidewalk and it is kind of steep. However, breakfast was awesome once again, and cheap.. There was this crazy girl next to us that kept bugging us repeatedly. Don´t know what she wanted but she left soon enough.
After we devoured our plates of traditional Honduran breakfast (again: beans, plantains, pork, and this time making an appearance for the first time, the tortillas and avocados), we start the drive. This is Alexey´s turn at the wheel so we are assured of two things: we´ll get there quickly, and Rosinante will grind his teeth at every gear change :) No no.. in all seriousness, he has been treating Rosinante much better now a days.
So after heading back in the direction of San Pedro Sula and passing by Tela we reach the town of Progreso once again. This is where we connect to our road to Tegucigalpa. The drive there was uneventful aside from a stop to buy fruit on the side of the road. We negotiate to purchase 1 pineapple (freshly cut into pieces for us), 1 cold coconut and 1 whole brach full of baby bananas. The price tag is all of 30 Lempiras or about $2US.. not too bad. These bananas kept us well fed through the next 2 days of driving!
Tegulcigalpa is the city in Honduras where the regular people leave. That is, you find the sense of insecurity that you expect. In school we learned how this product called Resistol (aka Resist-all, an extra strength glue) was used by kids in the streets as drugs. We have verified this and seen kids sniffing this glue around the markets in Tegucigalpa. We find the city has its own charm, however. The very quaint church and plaza (which Alexey thinks it´s cool because of its asymmetry) were really nice. We walked around a little and saw the presidential palace that is printed on the Honduran currency.
At this point we have checked into this really nice hotel. Our hotel in Roatan was not the best nor comfortable so we have decided to splurge for tonight! The room rate at the McArthur Hotel was $60US but we negotiate it to $50 and we get air conditioning!! So we are ready to go to an Internet cafe nearby to update the blog. However, on the way there, we pop into this local drinking hole. Most people in this establishment are not eating but drinking. Every table has at least 6 empty bottles so we have some catching up to do. While there, we meet Craig who is an Aussie who has spent the last few years of his life here. He is an old man with lots of stories. Most of such stories evolve around seafood trading and young Honduran women. After we are done with our food, he invites us over for a beer and tells us the story of his connections with the mafia and how one time some guys told him that his lobsters arrived dead (all 1000 of them) from Australia to Asia. Oh well, we found it quite amusing.
So it´s time to update the blog. It´s around 10PM and it really looks dark and unsafe outside. I talk a bit with the woman in charge of the internet cafe and she sees that as foreigners we don´t really understand this area of the city (the center). Therefore, she sends her two best men around (really cool guys), who agree to walk us to our hotel about 4 blocks away. Once there we say good bye and get back to the comfort of the McArthur. Tomorrow will be a big day. We will attempt to cross the border into Nicaragua. Wish us luck!
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